…ten items you wouldn’t believe that we (the British) could export.

1. Sand to the Arabs  - Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum prefers Cheshire’s sand to that of Dubai for his race horses.
2. Canoes to the Eskimos — glass fibre canoes. The Arctic is short on wood. Plus glass fibre is more durable.
3. Cheese to France — the French can’t get enough of our cheddar, stilton, and wensleydale.
4. Tea to China — we send tea worth £600,000 a year. The Chinese like the upmarket image of such companies as Twinings. However, China sends us tea worth £412m.
5. Naans to India — Indians they like the fact that they are packaged.
6. Coffee Makers to Italy
7. Vodka to Eastern Europe
8. Curry to Asia — in the form of Patak sauces.
9. Wine to Germany
10. Pizza to Italy

And the Brits import bagpipes from Pakistan, whisky from Japan, and coal from Russia.

It really is a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.

To keep up-to-date with all our news (and have access to exclusive sales and giveaways) do join us on Facebook.

The Make Awards celebrate these businesses – their creativity, their passion for design, and the impeccable customer service they offer.

And Coulson Macleod sell on NOTHS.

And we’re pretty confident that we are creative. We most definitely have a passion for design. And we are very proud to offer impeccable customer service. If you agree, we’d be delighted if you’d vote for Coulson Macleod.

Voting will go live in May, but in the meantime you can nominate Coulson Macleod via NOTHS’ Facebook page. You can read about the Customer Votes, which are broken down to three awards

1. Gift of the Year
2. Hero Product of the Year
3. Best Customer Service

Thank you.

Coulson Macleod has been nominated for a High Growth Award in this year’s Business Mum Awards.

It’s the 3rd annual Business Mum Awards, which is promoted by the UK’s leading Mumpreneur support network, MumsClub.

Winners will be announced 8th March, which is International Women’s Day.

Related articles:

• Small Business Of The Year
• International Trader Of The Year

And lo and behold they have included us.

Under section 3 titled Better Town Centres, subheading New Shops, (yes, you can tell this is an Executive Committee document so do bear with me) it says,

3.1 Kettering resident Hannah Macleod started the design brand Coulson Macleod in 2009 without any external financing.  Hannah is one of three finalists for Small Business of the Year in the East Midlands ‘Women of Worth’ Awards.  Along with Hannah, several other entrepreneurs have rolled up their sleeves and are creating businesses in our town centre.  Within the last two months we have seen the opening of:…

It then goes on to list a few shops that have opened up, such as a florist and a boutique.

So thanks Kettering Borough Council for recognising the contribution we’re making.

Related articles:

• Small Business Of The Year
• International Trader Of The Year: Part 2

Regular readers of this blog ‘Not For Squares’ will know that Coulson Macleod was recently a finalist at the Northamptonshire Business Excellence Awards 2010.

We were down to the final four businesses in the category — International Trader of the Year.

Among the companies nominated for awards was The Pickled Village. Brilliant name. Brilliant products.

We were delighted to see they’d been nominated as our cupboards are stocked with their jars of yummy preserves and chutneys.

The Pickled Village was founded in 2008 by Camille Ortega McLean. Camille runs the village shop, stocked with fabulous hand-picked fine foods including her own range of preserves, chutneys, dressings and marinades. How lucky are the residents of Bulwick?

The recipes for The Pickled Village derive from the all over the world, but all have a local flavour, whether from locally sourced natural ingredients or from adding traditional English twist to an exotic recipe.

And who could resist starting the day with a Cuban Breakfast, a very zingy lime marmalade using all the ingredients of a Mojito cocktail. How decadent.

Related articles:

• International Trader Of The Year: Part 2
• International Trader Of The Year
• A Little Bit Of PR

We’ve made it to the final four entrants at this years Northamptonshire Business Excellence Awards for International Trader of the Year sponsored by HSBC.

International Trader. Us!

Well we have shipped our typographic prints to Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, and right across the USA.

The winners will be announced at a gala dinner on 18th November.

Related articles:

• Mumpreneur Awards 2010
• A Little Bit Of PR
• Mum In Line For National Award
• Mums In Business

]]> http://www.blog.coulsonmacleod.com/2010/10/21/international-trader-of-the-year/feed/ 3 http://www.blog.coulsonmacleod.com/2010/08/25/ja-vi-elsker-dette-landet/ http://www.blog.coulsonmacleod.com/2010/08/25/ja-vi-elsker-dette-landet/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:42:46 +0000 Macleod http://www.blog.coulsonmacleod.com/?p=1696 Ja, vi elsker dette landet? It’s Norwegian. It translates as, Yes, we love this country. This is the title of their national anthem. And this is how Coulson Macleod feels about Norway.

Why do we love Norway?

Actually the question should be, why does Norway love Coulson Macleod?

We’ve just taken an order from our fourth stockist there. Coulson and I are thinking a trip to Norway is in order. We can visit our gorgeous-looking stockists in Oslo, Bergen, Gjøvik, and Nittedal (pictured)…

and this gorgeous looking country…

Related articles: Tusen Takk Trondheim

Victoria creates personalized enchanted portraits from your own photos. And they really are quite charming.

In particular I love her Family Tree…

You could have real fun posing your family. I rather like the idea of having Great Granny swinging in the uppermost branches.

Well folks, we have beaten our sales record. We have sold more prints in August than in any other month in the entire history of Coulson Macleod. And we’ve been up and running for almost eighteen months.

We have a whiteboard on our office wall. Every time we make a sale we wipe off the old number and write up the new one. I say we, but actually I usually do this, partly because my handwriting is neater, but mainly because it gives me a huge amount of pleasure. Every month we write down how many we’ve sold, whether they’ve been sold via Not On The High Street or through shops or if they’re bespoke and how many came via one of our adverts in Elle Decoration or Livingetc.

We love our whiteboard. We quite often catch each other staring at it fondly. Because every month the figures go up. And that is super exciting.

And this month, only half way through August I might point out, we’ve notched up the biggest number since our records began. To let you into a secret, we only started recording this on the board since November, which was when we started selling in serious numbers and the idea of a whiteboard sprang into our heads.

So ladies and gentlemen, tonight we may clink our glasses and say a little toast to our little booming business that we love so much.

We have a copycat.

On the one hand this is flattering. They obviously think we’re a good model to base your business on. Which we are. On the other hand, as you can imagine, it’s annoying.

When they first launched, about a year after us, they even had the audacity of producing a canvas-mounted artwork exactly the same as ours. Until we threatened legal action. Now they have something pretty similar, just not as good.

Coulson Macleod’s ‘No Place Like Home’ canvas-mounted art print

But they don’t just copy designs. Far more than that. They follow everything we do, then replicate it. Weird hey?

This copycat company has also stolen designs from other companies, then sells them as ‘unique’. At least three other companies have had their ideas reproduced.

Sometimes when we’ve written something on our blog, or our Facebook page, or tweet on Twitter, I see almost the same words the next day from this company. It’s like hearing an echo.

No doubt they’ll be reading this. But as they have no shame I don’t for one second think this will stop them.

Oh the joys of being in business!

Coulson Macleod HQ has been trying to buy shredded newspaper.

Why?

Well firstly by its very nature it’s recycled. Which is good. And it’s in keeping with what we do. Typographic packaging. Perfect.

But can I find a company that does it? No.

We recently ordered some plants from a nursery in Cornwall. Inside the box was shredded newspaper. And we thought how much better that would be than using bubble wrap to keep our art safe on its journey.

So I Googled. And Googled. But could not find anyone that sells it. I contacted our local council. They didn’t provide a solution. So I contacted the nursery and they buy it as animal bedding. But the company they buy from only supplies Cornwall. Then I found a company in Scotland. But their minimum order was 20 x 20kg bales. Yikes! We’re not farmers and we don’t have a spare barn.

So if anyone reading this knows of a company, preferably within the Midlands, that sells clean shredded newspaper, please let us know.

Limited edition canvas-mounted art print by Coulson Macleod

And the second is ‘The Rolling Stones’…

Limited edition canvas-mounted art print by Coulson Macleod

Little confession time. Our two new prints have actually replaced two. ‘The Pixies’ and ‘The Velvet Underground’. Why? Erm… well… *whisper* they were not that popular.

Could have lied and said they had sold out. But that’s lying and we don’t lie. And of course the whole reason for our blog is to record the ups and downs of Coulson Macleod.

There is no point keeping them if they don’t sell. They are a remnant of the first days of Coulson Macleod, when Coulson used to design things just for himself. He loves The Pixies. And he loves The Velvet Underground. But clearly not everyone shares his enthusiasm.

And to quote The Beatles, it really is a ‘long and winding road’.

We’ve been debating this for some time now here at Coulson Macleod HQ. Basically we don’t want to put our prices up. But if we want to continue growing, then we have to.

For any regular readers of this blog, you’ll have been following our progress as we grow and learn, the way you do when you launch a new business.

In September Coulson Macleod will be 18 months old. It’s been a fantastic 18 months. When we started the business we had no idea just what a global brand Coulson Macleod would become. Of course we hoped that people would like our art, and that some would become customers.

As the business has slowly grown we’ve made little tweaks here and there. And occasionally we make some whopping changes. Over the course of 18 months, we’ve had three completely new websites, can anyone remember the first version? We’ve created then deleted entire collections. And we’ve talked endlessly about where we want to go in the future. Sometimes to each other, sometimes to anyone who’ll listen.

The outcome is always the same. That in order to sell through stockists, and online marketplaces, and to go to trade fairs, and to create new and exciting collections, (and then there’s something called VAT, which I don’t understand and Coulson gets fed up trying to explain!), our prices are just a little too low to make this a long time viable and profitable business.

Our plans don’t involve charging Damien Hirst prices so we can retire to a villa in Antibes (although that would be nice). When we set out we wanted to create affordable art that we loved. This will remain the same. But you’ll just need a few more pennies (oh OK then, you’ll need a few more pounds).

So if you fancy owning a wonderful and unique piece of art at their current brilliant prices, then I’d suggest buying your Coulson Macleod before 1st September.

On Alexa we have a traffic rank of 270,415 in the UK.

And if you type in Coulson Macleod in Google, there are 129,000 results. And this keeps on growing.

So big thank you to everyone who has ever written anything about Coulson Macleod anywhere on the internet.